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Conversational design hinges on customers being able to easily interact with your skill to get information in a way that makes sense for them. Doing this right requires you to think about the many ways a customer could interact with your skill and then identify the way to facilitate the best interaction possible.

To do this, your options are to:

Go the route of the phone tree, or create flowcharts to try to capture the ways customers might interact with your skill.

Start with a script.

You might be thinking that flowcharting sounds like a more comprehensive way to design for conversation, but that's actually not the case. Let me show you why:

SCENE — Jed's living room. There are bills all over the coffee table and cat toys strewn across every other surface. Jed stands in the middle of the chaos holding his phone up on speaker phone.

You get the idea. From the second we hear the robotic voice on the other end of a call, most of us are smashing the zero button hoping to reach a person and circumvent what will inevitably end in frustration and wasted time. We know what we want and don't want to have to do is guess the right number based on options that don't really fit our needs.

The same issue pertains to conversational design, but times 1,000. In a conversation, whether with a friend or Alexa, we expect the flow of information to be fluid and responsive. Consider the fact that, when speaking with a friend, you have the ability to change subjects at will. You can even respond to a question with another question:

Jed: What should we get for lunch?

Jed's wife: I don’t know. What do you want?

This kind of variability and agency on the part of the user makes designing branching pathways for conversation extremely difficult because the possible branches are endless. In the above conversation between Jed and his wife, what happens later when, after making a decision on Mexican food, Jed changes his mind? If you were designing a branching conversation with him about his restaurant choices, the branch of the conversation for what type of food he wants now needs to be duplicated and subtly changed to account for the new possibility. There just isn't enough time or paper out there to chart all the conversational possibilities!

On the other hand, there are several benefits to starting with scripts when designing for conversation. First, a script represents the simplest “happy path” interaction your users can have. This is the scenario where they say exactly what you hope they'll say and you're able to help them accomplish whatever task they've set out on. You need to know this in order to shape your skill conversationally.

Second, a script allows you to read out your skill's dialog. The written word is vastly different from the way we speak. Grab a friend or colleague and read your script aloud to expose awkward sounding words or phrases.

Third (and most relevant), scripts enable you to prepare for the unexpected. With your happy-path script written out, you can read through it to identify places where users might want to say something different and plan accordingly.

As you read through your script, put yourself in the shoes of different people who might use your skill (your personas) and read the script with their situations and motivations in mind. Chances are, you'll identify how assumptions change the conversation based on each persona. Each time this happens, write what the persona said in the margins.

With a happy path script covered in flow-breaking utterances, your next task will be leveraging the conversation-enabling features of the Alexa Skills Kit to handle them. With the Alexa Skills Kit, designers and developers have the ability to tap into natural language understanding and entity resolution, enabling users to just say what they want to get from the skill, rather than selecting a number from a branching menu.

To learn more about script writing and adding flexibility to your voice experiences, visit the designing for conversation course. Take a look today and get started designing the next big idea for voice!

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